


close to death and close to finding truth

by ohallows



Series: across the bars [1]
Category: Rusty Quill Gaming (Podcast)
Genre: (Spoilers for post-Rome), Angst, Canon Compliant, Regret, Sasha is mentioned and Hamid is sleeping but there, Unrequited Love, major character death is referenced
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-14
Updated: 2019-09-14
Packaged: 2020-10-18 11:20:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20638319
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohallows/pseuds/ohallows
Summary: Neither Azu nor Zolf are sleeping, and if neither of them are sleeping, they might as well be talking.





	close to death and close to finding truth

**Author's Note:**

> i see your ‘azu doesn’t trust zolf’ and raise you ‘ok but what if she does in my heart’
> 
> title is from ‘we might fall’ by ryan star bc i just put that on repeat and let ‘er rip
> 
> kudos and comments are appreciated!!

It’s late. The only sound in the cell is the sound of slight water dripping into the bucket they have set up in the corner, and Zolf turns another page of his book as the cell grows darker and darker, the light of the moon blocked out by the clouds in the sky, stuck in an eternal rain. 

Hamid is sleeping, again. He’s been doing a lot of that, lately; Zolf can’t blame him. After all, they’re still stuck in the cell, what’s a better way to pass the time?

It’s been three days since Zolf and Wilde had first heard anything about Wilde’s team, Zolf’s old mercenary company, three days since Hamid and a stranger had shown up on their doorstep looking like something had broken both of them, and been tricked into the anti-magic cell to make sure they were exactly who they said they were.

After all, Wilde’s been burned before, quite literally, and to Zolf’s recollection, Hamid is handy with the fire magic, and they really don’t need another outburst like they’d had the first time around. 

Three days. Four more in the cell to make it a full week, because even if Zolf is certain that Hamid is Hamid after he asked for every amenity under the stars and the sky, they can’t be sure about the orc - Azu - and the protocol can’t be ignored just because Zolf desperately needs Hamid to be here, to be real.

And maybe that’s why Zolf can’t stop looking at him, as much as he tries, and he’s never been more grateful for dark vision and annoyed that he _ can’t _give Azu and Hamid the privacy that he desperately wants to.

Azu isn’t sleeping. She’s barely slept since they’d been dropped into the cell, since Zolf spoke to her in the darkened room, and he doesn’t blame her for not wanting to close her eyes. He remembers nearly doing the same to Wilde when he’d first been kidnapped, and he _ trusted _ Wilde, even if the man was a bit of a prick. 

“You should get some sleep,” Zolf finally says, slipping an old ripped up sheet of paper into the book to mark his place before shutting it. Insomnia, whether intentional or incidental, isn’t something he wishes on anyone, not after seeing how badly it had affected Wilde, not after screaming himself awake on more than enough occasions only to lay awake, terrified of the images his mind came up with, before dragging himself out of bed in the morning and not feeling like a person. 

“I’m not tired,” Azu says in response, and her voice is tight and tense, and Zolf holds in the sigh. 

“You should still try to sleep. It’s late.”

“I do not want to.” It’s quiet but it’s strong, convicted. She’s gently stroking something on a chain wrapped around her neck, and the slight pink glow that she had when they’d walked into the inn is dimmed, nearly gone. 

“Well, what do you want, then?” Zolf asks, a wall up around his words. The obvious answer is ‘out of the cage’ but there’s no way that he’ll listen, and he thinks Azu knows that by the slight withering glare that she directs in his direction. He doesn’t completely blame her, either. Being drugged and dropped in a cage by someone who is basically a stranger to you isn’t something any rational person would be okay with. 

Zolf knows _ he _reacted badly when Wilde had pulled the same with him.

“I have some questions,” Azu says instead, and Zolf puts the book down completely. He’s not going to be getting back to it tonight, not now, and he supposes that he owes Azu at least a modicum of an explanation after dropping both her and Hamid into a cage unexpectedly.

“Fine, go on then. But I won’t be sharing any state secrets, as it were,” he warns, and folds his arms. He thinks he already knows what she’s going to ask, wants to think he knows _ Hamid _ well enough to know what he would focus on when telling stories about him, but anything can come up when you’re traveling together for months, so he braces himself in his chair. “What do you want to know?”

“Hamid told me that you left, in Prague,” Azu says, and it isn’t accusatory, isn’t an interrogation, but Zolf can’t help but feel like he’s under examination, on trial for abandoning the people he loves. It’s been eighteen months since he’d stepped out of the brewery, eighteen months since he left his heart behind in the hands of two people he’d met a month before, eighteen months since he spiraled so far that the only viable option for him was leaving the team, taking himself off of the meritocrat’s chess board because he was just going to be a liability. 

“I did,” Zolf says, and it’s hard biting back the guilt that still, months, _ years _ later, rises to the surface, but he does. It had been the only option he could make; he _ broke, _ back on the airship, and the spiral that he fell into wouldn’t have helped any of them. He’d needed to leave, had needed to sort himself out before he could become any semblance of useful again. 

Azu hums, and it’s just as unreadable as her face has been for this entire conversation, but Zolf still feels like he’s being weighed against _ something_, actions and words measured up against some mythical ideal, and he doesn’t completely know what Hamid has told Azu about him, but he hopes it’s not completely deriding.

It wouldn’t be. Hamid isn’t like that; he’s not vindictive, he’s not cruel. He’s smart, and understands people in a way Zolf never did. Never could. He thrived, after Zolf left, and Zolf understands on a logical level that it wasn’t _him _leaving that caused Hamid to bloom, it was just the _opportunity_ he had to lead, but it’s sometimes hard to remember that he wasn’t the one keeping Hamid back from his potential. 

“You care for him a great deal, don’t you?” Azu says, and Hamid stirs behind her. Her voice is quiet in the din, but it’s still too loud for this. 

“Yes,” is all Zolf can say, and it’s helpless, inevitable. How was he supposed to _ not _ care about Hamid, with how brightly he shone? “I do.”

“And yet, you left.” Azu doesn’t make it a question, and Zolf can’t do anything but nod, a lump in his throat. 

“It was the decision I had to make,” he says, and he can see Azu nod in the darkness, but she doesn’t look like she understands it any more than she did. Zolf doesn’t blame her. Most people, when they care about someone, don't leave them behind in a dingy bar while they go on to have a mental breakdown.

Most people, though, aren’t dealing with their entire world silently imploding before their eyes, wondering if any decision they’ve ever made has been the right one, internally screaming about how their choices broke _ everything_. 

Most people haven’t had to put someone they love back together because their organs were spilling out, hands shaking as they prayed harder than they ever had in their life. 

“You cared about Sasha, too,” Azu says, and Zolf can’t hide the flinch. 

God, _ Sasha_. She was the best of all of them, the one who had been owed a happy ending the most; not getting lost forever in the planes and… well, no, she’d want to be forgotten. Not by the people who cared about her, no, but by everyone else. Zolf won’t forget. He can’t. 

He’d - he’d thought he mourned them, _ all _ of them, Sasha and Hamid and. Well, maybe not Bertie. He hadn’t cared, much, not at the end. But then Hamid had come back, and Sasha hadn’t. And it had hit him just that hard again, because he’d been given a sliver of hope and clung onto it like he was a drowning man gasping for air, just to be pushed back underwater when Hamid hadn’t been able to answer, when Azu had told him that she’d been lost. 

“Yeah. I loved her. Not like - it was different, yeah? I love them both, I’m not - I’m done hiding that, now, but it wasn’t.” He lets out a frustrated sigh. “They weren’t the… same.” 

And they weren’t. He isn’t lying. He had loved Sasha, had trusted her more than nearly anyone, and he hopes that she had felt the same in return. But there - it was completely platonic. She became his family, and he would have done anything for her. 

He.

He still feels guilty. Not for leaving, exactly, but for not being there for her. Wilde had told him a few things about her condition, and Zolf regrets leaving just before it got bad. Not that _ he _ would have been able to do anything. Clerics heal, and that was the exact opposite of what she’d needed. But he still regrets leaving her to figure it out on her own. Making her go to a stranger to figure it out.

He wishes he could have apologized, for that if nothing else. 

And he’d have done anything for Hamid, too. Still would, if given the opportunity, even knowing how Wilde would view that thought. He doesn’t much care, is the thing. 

“You love him?” Azu says, cutting into his thoughts, and Zolf doesn’t know when this turned into him spilling all of his secrets to someone he barely knows, someone who might be infected, someone who’s been running around with Hamid and Sasha for the past whoever knows how long. He’s nervous to look over at her, nervous to see the pity in her eyes that he knows must be there. So he doesn’t. 

“Yeah,” he says gruffly. “Doesn’t matter. I know how this goes.”

“You don’t think he feels the same?” Azu asks, and the genuine curiosity in her voice nearly breaks him. 

Think? Zolf _ knows_, has known it intimately since the second they’d met, that Hamid would feel that way from him. It didn’t stop his heart from beating faster when he’d clasped Hamid’s hand in Dover. Didn’t stop his entire chest from swelling when Hamid and Sasha had said they’d brave the Channel with him. Didn’t make it easier to watch Hamid go on a date with that woman in Paris. Didn’t help the traitorous thoughts of _ maybe _ when he woke up to Hamid crouched over him, eyes worried as he clutched onto Zolf’s shoulder and pulled him into a hug.

It was never going to happen, _ is _ never going to happen, and Zolf’s made his peace with it. He knows Hamid loves him back, just not in the same way. Or, well, loved. Definitely cared about Zolf, as much as anyone would a close friend, but not… _ that. _He doesn’t even know if Hamid still does, not after he left. Not after he dropped them into a cage.

“Azu, please. You can’t tell him,” Zolf says, and he hates the way it sounds broken, sounds desperate. But he knows how this story ends, has known how it ends ever since he first met Hamid and felt his chest burn like a dying ember on a fire, warmer than he’d been in months. And the immediate tampering down of any feelings he might have had, because there was _ no way _in all the realms and all the planes that someone like Hamid would be interested in someone like Zolf. They met by chance and were thrown together over the course of a day, all in service to a mission that Zolf doesn’t even completely think he believes in anymore. 

If Hamid had seen him on the street, he would have kept walking. Zolf understands this. It’s the fact that Bertie had signed on to his mercenary company that had brought Hamid over. It’s not -

Listen. Zolf’s… better now. Doesn’t hate himself as much, doesn’t see himself as a liability, but that doesn’t change the fact that he _ knows _Hamid doesn’t feel the same way in return. It doesn’t… hurt as much as it used to. Not like when he used to sit awake and bed and wonder what the hell he was doing, half-falling for this halfling who he’d met less than a week ago. He - he understands, now, in a way he didn’t back then. The situation has changed but the outcome has remained the same. It’s not Zolf, it’s not some defect he has, it’s not something he can change.

It’s just - Hamid’s not interested. Wouldn’t be interested in him, because as close as they became they’re still _ so _ different, and Zolf dealt with that for a month, and then he mourned him for a year and a half, and now Hamid has come back into his life like a whirlwind, and the feelings have come back just as strongly as they’ve always been, and Zolf realizes that they’ve been dormant the entire time, just waiting for a sliver of hope to catch on to. But it doesn't _ matter_. Hamid doesn’t feel the same, and Zolf’s lived with it for going on two years now, he can do it for another 150 or whatever. Feelings fade, yeah? He’ll be fine.

...

None of that makes the twisting in his chest feel any lighter. None of that makes his heart stop flipping when the light plays off of Hamid’s face in the morning. None of that makes his traitorous brain stop thinking about the what-ifs.

None of that makes any of this easier.

“Zolf, if it were me…” Azu says, eventually, and there’s something in her face that looks like regret, like pain, like everything in her world had been taken away and ground up right in front of her eyes, and it’s that more than anything else that convinces Zolf that she might, maybe, understand. “I would want to know. Or, if I were in your shoes, I would want to tell them.”

“Sasha?” Zolf asks, and it's nothing more than a whisper because everything about this hurts, and he can feel his own chest constrict when Azu nods, slightly. 

“She - she didn’t even _ want _ to go to Rome, didn’t trust it, and -“ Azu cuts herself off, and Zolf can see the tears falling down her face, and feels his own eyes start to burn. “We lost her. We couldn’t save her, her or Grizzop, and now they’re somewhere where we can’t find them, can’t protect them.”

“I’m - I’m so sorry, Azu,” Zolf says, and his throat is choked with the tears that he refuses to let fall. “I can’t even - can’t _ imagine _ it.”

Azu looks up and over at him at that, and the grief and pain in her eyes is palpable. But something on his face must convince her that he isn’t lying, that he’s being as true to himself as he can be, and it must satisfy her. 

They sit in silence, for another moment or two, while Zolf tries to fight off the widening hole in his chest. It doesn’t feel like it’s going to break him, this time; he’s not going to spiral again, he swears it. There isn’t time for that, and he’s - he’s done enough introspection in the past eighteen months that he knows how to head it off, now. Knows to tell Wilde when it’s getting bad. And now with Hamid and Azu here, he has more people to lean on. More people to trust, when he feels the darkness creeping up at the edge of his vision. 

“I won’t tell him,” Azu says, eventually, voice cutting through the silence. “I swear on my oath to Aphrodite. But… I think you should.”

Zolf doesn’t know how to tell her that he can’t. It’s - there’s not space for that, now, not while the entire world has gone to hell in a handbasket, not when they have a mission that they can’t be distracted from, not when his feelings are _ exactly _what would distract them. 

He’s carried this for nearly two years. More won't kill him. They all have to save the world, again, because once, twice, three times wasn’t enough. 

“Thank you,” he says, instead of any of that, because he doesn’t know how to articulate any of it, but he hopes that Azu still understands. 

Still, Azu turns to look at Hamid and there’s a small hint of a smile on her face, tinged with a sliver of regret that she can’t completely hide from Zolf, even in the dark. 

“Even so, doesn’t he deserve a chance?” she asks, and trust a paladin of Aphrodite to refuse to quit.

“It won’t happen,” Zolf says, and his tone brokers no argument, but Azu either doesn’t catch it or doesn’t care.

“You won’t know until you try,” she says, and there’s a flicker of pain in her face again, smoothed out nearly instantly, and Zolf doesn’t think she’s only seeing Hamid laying there.

“Get some rest, Azu,” Zolf says again, because he doesn’t know what else to say. Azu looks at him critically for a moment, but for the first time it doesn’t feel like she’s measuring him against an impossible ideal. 

“You should too,” she says, and it’s gentle. “You look exhausted.”

He _ is _ exhausted, but the protocol needs to be followed, and the protocol allows for minimal sleep. It’s fine. Zolf’s done this before, existed on limited sleep before, and as much as it drags at him, he knows he’ll survive it. Still. He knows it’s Hamid in there, and if their story is true, then Azu must be safe as well.

And maybe it goes against Wilde’s entire code, but Zolf feels like he can trust both of them. He still won’t share plans with them, not yet, but he doesn’t think either of them are going to turn. 

“Yeah,” he says, finally. “Maybe I will.”

He doesn’t know which comment it’s the answer to.

**Author's Note:**

> this is technically canon-compliant and i’m clinging to that


End file.
